Malaysia's OSK partners with SunGard for regional growth

Growth ambitions and the need to meet the requirements of its international client base has driven Malaysia’s OSK Investment Bank to speed up on automation of its trading system to handle higher volumes and more complex orders, according to John Lau, managing director and regional head of sales trading at OSK Securities in Hong Kong.

Growth ambitions and the need to meet the requirements of its international client base has driven Malaysia’s OSK Investment Bank to speed up on automation of its trading system to handle higher volumes and more complex orders, according to John Lau, managing director and regional head of sales trading at OSK Securities in Hong Kong.

OSK had previously relied on a legacy infrastructure of different systems supplied locally or executed institutional client orders manually, but has now selected a range of solutions from SunGard, based on the technology provider’s global track record, including south east Asia where the firm is supporting the ASEAN Exchanges trading link.

OSK’s implementation of the SunGard Global Network (SGN) connectivity solution and SunGard’s Valdi Order Management System (Valdi OMS) has been completed in Hong Kong, and implementation will follow in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta. OSK will also deploy SunGard’s system for trades into the Stock Exchange of Thailand through its local securities unit OSK Securities (Thailand), formed from its acquisition of a 51.1% stake in BFIT Securities.

“We are able to receive orders from different FIX networks and vendors, and combine all the orders into one system so it is more efficient for the dealing team executing orders. Previously there were different types of systems and some included manual operations,” said Lau. “Now its ticketless, seamless and all the executions go straight to our operations desk.”

Although he acknowledged that recent low volumes had not tested the new systems fully, Lau said OSK’s capacity “has increased dramatically”, equipping the bank to handle bigger, more varied and more complicated order types. “This is a benchmark by which many of our international competitors and clients operate. We are still growing and this system enables us to expand and also to meet the requirements of a broader base of clients,” said Lau.

The deal with SunGard also covers algorithmic trading and program trading solutions. “These four markets (Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia) have to ‘talk’ to each other and our OMS is designed for multi-market trading,” said Gregory So, head of sales North-East Asia at SunGard Global Trading.

OSK is an investment banking group headquartered in Kuala Lumpur and its parent company, OSK Holdings Berhad, is a publicly-listed company on Bursa Malaysia. The group offers a wide range of financial products and services for corporate and retail clients, including retail and institutional equities and futures, research, corporate finance, equity capital markets, debt capital markets, treasury, derivatives and structured products, unit trust management, asset management, trustee services and Islamic banking. OSK has more than 85 offices across Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Hong Kong and China.

OSK’s new trading platform enables the firm to to source any type of alternative liquidity pool that provides good execution, anonymity and access to liquidity. “We would consider internal as well as external sources of liquidity. What we really aim for is best execution wherever that execution or liquidity can be found,” said Lau.

With SunGard’s Valdi OMS, OSK will be able to increase the number and types of orders it can handle and provide its clients with an integrated regional trading system, while SunGard’s SGN securities market data and order routing network will help it connect its regional offices to a large global trading community. SGN links 2,300 buy-side and sell-side firms worldwide, and connects to over 120 markets. Four ASEAN bourses (Bursa Malaysia, the Philippine Stock Exchange, Singapore Exchange and the Stock Exchange of Thailand) have selected SunGard to provide a link that will electronically interconnect participating exchanges to facilitate cross-border order routing and trading, thus helping investors and members access ASEAN markets via a single connection. SunGard will supply the infrastructure for the network based on its Valdi trading solution suite.

“We were assigned the ASEAN link project whereby we are chosen to be the backbone of order routing, so we are in a good position to offer regional order routing,” So added.